Random Detox

My Robot Deja Vu

Okay, so I’m browsing BoingBoing (one of my favoritest websites in the whole wide web evarrrr!), and they have a post on a Japanese sunblock commercial featuring a fembot. (Their beef is that it’s creepy, but I don’t think she is, then again I’m biased.)

The screencap looks familiar so I clickthrough to watch the video. Here it is, have a watch.

The first few seconds confirm my gut feeling. I’ve seen that robot! I’ve seen her and I’ve touched her!! Have I told you guys the reason I went to Japan earlier this year? It was for a tour of the Computer Science laboratories in NAIST, a university in Japan.

We were introduced to a robot in one of the laboratories. The lab geeks named her, but I forgot now what she was called. Those boys were really attached to her. You could tell by the way they affectionately looked at her and how tenderly they fixed her hair before us, haha. I’m serious!!! (My friends and I later wondered what her true relationship with her boys were hahahaha.)

The lab didn’t create the robot. They bought her for experimental purposes. It was the Robotics lab, by the way. So they did have a legit reason. Hahaha. The robot is made by Sanrio, the same company that makes Hello Kitty and Kerokeroppi (my favorite brands from childhood hahaha).

She’s quite pretty, that robot. Her skin is made of silicon, and the boys let us touch her, and her skin really did feel eerily real. Her hair is made from real human hair. But her makeup is painted on hehe.

We had a few burning questions for the lab geeks. First off, was she anatomically accurate??? Yes, they answered. Hehehehehe. We didn’t ask any follow up questions from that, but were they burning in ours heads? Oh yes. Hahaha.

We jokingly asked if she could be pieced apart like a mannequin, since she’s just a pretty computer. Maybe change her arms, or change her head. We really were just joking. Guess what we were told??? She can change her boobies!!! Hahahaha! I think the lab had a few sizes stored somewhere. Hahahaha! Now you see why we were wondering what she truly meant to the lab hahahaha! A lab that made up of all men, for your information, hahaha.

The lab could control her actions, like eye blinks, or head turning, or voicing out something… I’m saying that BoingBoing video is NOT creepy. The fembot in the video is actually likeable. They should have seen the fembot at the lab, hehe. Now SHE was creepy.

The fembot had a range of emotions. She could look happy, look sad, look angry, and of course shift from one to another in a blink of an eye. Scary hehehe. And it seemed that from the angle we were looking at her, she was staring back at us!!! Doubly scary hahaha.

The lab showed us how they could control the fembot. Of course, at times they would stop showing her off to talk to us, and at times like that sometimes her head would just suddenly fall, or her face lose all expression… hahaha.

Haha! Maybe the reason why they made her is because these Japanese scientists are so busy with their careers that they don’t have any time to socialize.. so they created the FemBot. There was even a drama series here that features a Male Robot as “Boyfriend for Hire”. Women hire the robot to become their boyfriends… creepy too. To make the robot “fall in love” with you, you must kiss him, and he or It is all yours. The downside is that when another woman kisses him/It, he forgets about you and is snagged by the other woman. :D

Hi Yileen, I’m not sure who they modeled her after, but yes, we were told her face belongs to a real woman. ;) Isn’t that creepier? Haha… Like how the blow-up doll used in medical emergency training is actually the face of an unknown beautiful woman who committed suicide… Yikes…

Kikamz, Really? Boyfriend for hire? Hahaha… I wonder what his “services” are? ;P